Grave Digger
by PiePrincess-andthe-FallenAngel
Summary: Stiles and Lydia are buried underground as the pack race to save their lives.


**Today is Thursday, which means it's time for #SterekScenes! I actually came up with this idea as a picture-set AU to post on my Sterek AU Instagram about 2 days before I found out about the different tropes for this week. And so, the second I saw this "scene stealer" day, I knew exactly what I was doing :)**

 **For those of you who haven't already figured it out from the title and summary, this ficlet is based on the Bones episode "Alien's in a Spaceship" S02E09. It's one of my all-time favourite Bones episodes and I really enjoyed making it into a Sterek ficlet. You don't need to have watched the episode to understand this fic. But if you haven't watched that episode and you don't want spoilers, then stop now because this does follow the episode fairly closely.**

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Stiles opened his eyes slowly to darkness. His brain was fuzzy and he felt lightheaded, concussed maybe? He cleared his dry throat and it brought him to a coughing fit.

"Stiles?" Someone asked behind him. It was a girl's voice, familiar, one that Stiles knew he should recognise instantly. But he couldn't focus on anything other than the spinning feeling in his head. He closed his eyes and took a deep, calming, breath. When Stiles opened his eyes again a few seconds later, the room didn't seem so dark anymore. In fact, Stiles realised it wasn't a room at all. The dull lights on his dashboard were barely enough to see by, but he knew his eyes would adjust soon enough. Stiles came to realise that his ears had been ringing only _after_ the ringing began to quieten. The jeep's radio was playing fruitlessly, signal jumping in and out manically and so the main sound escaping the box was white noise. Stiles jabbed randomly at the console until the noise stopped.

"Stiles? Are you okay?" The voice asked again and Stiles turned around to see Lydia sprawled across the backseat of his jeep.

"Where are we?" He asked her. "What happened?"

"I don't know…" Lydia murmured before looking towards the blackened window above her head. She dropped her hand to the floor next to her and picked something up and holding it out towards Stiles. "But we're underground." Stiles stared at Lydia's hand for a second. His eyes hadn't yet adjusted to let him see well and so he dug into his pocket and took out his phone. He threw a sparing glance at his signal and wasn't surprised to find he had no service, then he clicked on his torch app and shone the light at Lydia's hand.

Stiles swallowed thickly as he looked around him at the windows of the jeep. He dropped the torch and turned on the overhead light, instead. The light flickered as it turned on, but he could soon confirm what Lydia had stated. The only thing Stiles could see out of the windows were the airgaps between the solidified chunks of dirt that his car was buried underneath.

"Do you remember anything?" Lydia asked gently and Stiles shook his head as he continued to stare out into the black abyss. The movement made him feel dizzy and a sharp pain radiated from the back of his head. Stiles hissed and dabbed at the area lightly with his fingers. He noticed there was something coating his hair… dried blood, maybe? Stiles forced himself to think, tried his best to clear his mind of the confusion.

"I remember…" he started, slowly. "We were at the library."

"We left the library," Lydia said with a shake of her head. "We were heading back to Scott's."

"We were going to tell the pack what we found," Stiles muttered. The memories were starting to come back to him now. "But we took different cars. I was about to get into mine when I heard a noise and… when I turned around you were on the floor." Stiles concluded. He remembered a guy standing over Lydia, but that was about it. His head was hurting too much, he couldn't think. "Someone _attacked_ us and buried us alive in my _car_ ," Stiles said slowly, disbelieving. He turned back around to face Lydia. "Why would they do that?"

"You've got me… I mean, they could have at least chosen _my_ car. The seats are much more comfortable." Lydia put on a brave face, but Stiles could see through it. They sat in silence for a moment, unsure what to do. Lydia rolled the dirt around in her hand, dirt that Stiles could now see was all over the floor by the window and on the door cards too. She must have rolled down the window before she knew they were buried. Stiles' head hurt. It was just too much to take in.

"We need to catalogue everything in the car," Lydia said evenly, breaking Stiles out of his reverie. "We need to know what's in here… what we can use to get out." Stiles nodded and followed Lydia's lead.

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"He had a tattoo," Stiles mumbled after a few minutes and Lydia looked up at him from where she was scourging under the back seats.

"What?"

"The guy who attacked you… he had a tattoo on his arm." Lydia looked at him for a moment and sighed. "It was of a skull. But it was… different. It had patterns on it."

"That's great, Stiles. But, can you focus? We need to know exactly what we have so we can find a way out of here." Stiles couldn't agree with her, though, he knew how helpful little details could be in cracking a case.

"Lydia, calm down. We're going to get out…" Stiles started but Lydia cut him off.

" _Calm_ _down_? Have you seen where we are?"

"I know, we're underground. But it's going to be okay."

"No, you don't get it, Stiles," Lydia said slowly. "I don't know what's wrong with you… you've probably got a concussion… normally you wouldn't need me to tell you," Lydia muttered with a sad look on her face and Stiles' heart picked up at the look of worry on her face. He kept quiet, encouraging her to continue with a flick of his wrist. "I did some calculations. This car isn't very big, Stiles. And with _two_ of us in here… we've probably only got enough oxygen to last us for 10 hours… maybe less. Either way, we'll be unconscious by eight hours. And we don't even know how long we've been down here for already. I, for one, can't remember what time it was when we left the library. We could have been down here for hours already."

Stiles let Lydia's words sink in and checked the time on his phone. It was almost six pm. He knew that they got to the library around one pm… but when did they leave? Did he even bother to check?

"Look," Lydia said, a lot more gently. "We can deal with the tattoo when we get out of here. But until then, it's not much use." Stiles eventually just nodded and tried to file the information away for later. But there was something about that tattoo that Stiles… recognised. He blinked quickly to clear his mind, not wanting to shake his head in case he made himself dizzy again, and grabbed everything he could find from his dash and under the front seats as Lydia searched her bag and the boot of the car. Eventually they had an inventory of everything they had on them.

"Does that work?" Lydia asked as she pointed at the portable phone signal booster. Stiles had bought it a few months ago when they were forced to stake out clubs every night in order to catch an incubus. That area of town never had very good reception. Stiles had never been allowed to actually _leave_ the car, always getting shouted at by Derek or Scott to stay put, and so he bought the booster to keep himself entertained while everyone else searched the streets.

"Not anymore," Stiles sighed. "Scott broke the cable a couple of weeks ago."

"But the actually device still works?" Lydia asked, sitting up straight and looking hopeful.

"Erm, yeah… if we could get it to charge."

"Swap seats with me," Lydia demanded and Stiles was going to protest but she was already pulling herself over the back of the seats and Stiles moved quickly to jump from the driver to the passenger seat. "I need you in the back, Stiles. I need to get under the dash, there won't be enough room for you up front too." Stiles frowned but did as he was told.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to connect the booster to the car battery. It'll be too strong for it and the device will overload in a very short amount of time… but it might be long enough for your phone to pick up a signal and send out a message. Stiles winced as Lydia cracked open the dash of his car and she sighed. "Calm down, Stiles," Lydia huffed. "We can get your car fixed when we get out of here." Stiles bit his bottom lip to keep himself from arguing with her. He knew better than to talk back to Lydia when she was working.

But Stiles couldn't watch his beloved jeep get mutilated for much longer. He searched for something to do and eventually picked up the notepad and pen. He had agreed with Lydia to keep the skull tattoo out of his mind… but there was something about it that was pulling at his consciousness. It was familiar. Stiles knew he would be better at realising _how_ it was familiar if he could actually _see_ it. So he uncapped his pen and started scrawling out the lines on a blank page. He wasn't the best artist ever, but it was good enough to get his mind flowing again.

Half an hour later, Lydia let out a musical laugh and Stiles' head shot up from his notepad.

"I think I did it," Lydia exclaimed and she turned to beam at Stiles. "Everything is connected. All we have to do is start sending a text and then press down onto the car horn to activate the booster."

"We can send a message?" Stiles asked, incredulously, and Lydia nodded.

"One message. We'll only have about six to eight seconds before the booster fries and so it has to be short or else it won't send in time." Stiles looked down at his phone, which was currently resting on the seat next to him, and rubbed his eyes heavily.

"What do we send? Goodbye?"

"I was thinking of something a little more productive," Lydia reprimanded and Stiles sighed, his eyes skirting back to the picture he'd been drawing when, suddenly, something clicked.

"I know what we should tell them," he announced confidently.

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Derek blinked rapidly as he looked down at the text on his phone.

"It's from Stiles," Derek muttered, catching the attention of everyone in the room. The arguing teenagers all shut up immediately and rushed to stand behind Derek and read his text. But their hopeful faces dropped almost instantly when they saw the single word on the screen.

"What does it mean?" Liam asked and no one answered.

"What's a Calavera?" Scott questioned and Derek frowned at him.

"They're the hunters from New Mexico," Braeden sassed at him and Derek smiled, this was why he liked her. "You met them _literally_ a month ago."

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry I forgot their name. We've had a lot more to worry about since then," Scott replied and Derek could see how much Stiles and Lydia's disappearance was effecting him, Scott was snapping at everyone. Derek ignored the arguments as they started to build up once again, it wasn't helping anyone.

"Why would hunters have Stiles and Lydia?" Derek questioned to no one in particular. "They're human, it doesn't make sense."

" _Fine_!" Derek heard Scott yell and he lifted his head. "You can all stay here if you want, but _I'm_ going to go find my pack." Derek, wordlessly, stood up to join Scott before he'd even left the room. It only took another second before everyone else was following them.

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"We have to get out of here," Lydia mumbled three hours later as she looked over their supplies one last time.

"It's okay, Lydia. The pack will find us. We'll be okay," Stiles reassured her.

"You have a lot of faith."

"I don't need faith. Faith is an irrational belief in something impossible, I've seen what they can do… so have you. They can find us."

"No offence, but that was before… Allison's not here anymore. Neither are Boyd and Erica. Isaac and Chris are in France. Cora is off _God knows_ where… Derek's human now, Liam and Malia are still learning and Scott… you know that I love him, but he's clueless at the best of times," Lydia said matter-of-factly. "We are out of air, we don't know for sure if our message sent, much less if it'll do any good, and we are buried _underground_. What you have is faith." Stiles looked down and away from her, he couldn't really deny what she was insinuating so he didn't try any longer. "I think I have a plan," Lydia said quietly after about half a minute of silence and Stiles lifted his head to look at her. She wasn't facing him anymore though, she was looking out at the dark windows. "But it could kill us."

"What do you mean?"

"The airbags… if we set them off, used them as explosives… Like I said, we don't know if anyone is coming Stiles. But maybe we can used the explosives to blow our way out of the car, get ourselves out of here… It's risky, _very_ risky. We can wait until the last minute to try it. But, I just don't see any other way of us getting out of here alive, Stiles."

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"Where are they?" Derek asked as he stood with Braeden in front of the Calavera's. There were three hunters opposite them, not looking at all surprised to see them, and Derek was feeling cornered. But he tried to not let it show. It had taken the pack around 4 hours to find the hunters and with each passing second Derek had felt, more and more, sick to his stomach. He knew it wasn't his fault, there wasn't anything he could have done to protect Stiles from the hunters. But, ever since they'd first met, Derek had taken it upon himself to keep Stiles safe. And now Derek had failed. To make matters worse, when they finally found the Calaveras in an abandoned factory, every werewolf in the pack confirmed that Stiles and Lydia couldn't be smelt or heard inside the building.

"I'm surprised that you came, Derek," the eldest hunter muttered as she stepped forward. "I was expecting your alpha." Derek scowled and was suddenly thankful they had convinced Scott to let the humans go in first… Derek was certain that he was in less danger than Scott would be in his situation. The hunters may not like him, but they were less inclined to 'shoot first and ask questions later' when it came to humans. Which brought up the question that had been circling in Derek's mind for hours: _why did the Calaveras take Stiles and Lydia?_

"So was that your plan? Lead Scott here by kidnapping two members of his pack?" Derek asked suddenly and the eldest hunter sighed.

"This has never been about Scott or any of the rest of your pack. It's about the she-wolf."

"I thought we made it clear. We're not helping Kate," Braeden stated angrily and the hunter waved her off.

"Kate's an animal. She's given up looking for help, she just wants revenge on the pack that turned her into a monster,"

"She was always a monster," Derek grit out as his mind began to connect the dots. The hunters had taken Stiles and Lydia to try to weaken the pack. They assumed that Kate would still be lurking around and take her first chance at getting her revenge and the hunters would finally be able to take her down. Derek knew that he should feel relief, the hunters weren't trying to hurt his pack, but he felt no different. Stiles was still missing… Lydia too. And the hunters didn't seem in any rush to set them free.

"Where are they?" Derek asked again, barely stopping himself from charging forward and threatening the older lady.

"They're alive."

"We already know that," Braeden added and the hunter scowled at her.

"How?"

"They're smarter than you think. Now let them go," Derek demanded. He couldn't stand this. Part of his pack was in danger and he felt utterly useless. How was he supposed to save Stiles if he was still human?

"I don't think I will."

"You really want to kill two innocent teenagers?" Derek asked calmly. His fear, silent hatred and anger were bubbling deep down and he was trying his best to not explode

"They chose their side. Their alliance is with the wolves."

"They turned their backs against their own kind," one of the henchmen hunters added.

"Just like you did," the other one sneered at Braeden. Derek felt his girlfriend tense next to him and began to worry that she was only seconds away from taking out her gun and open firing.

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Lydia finished messing around underneath the wheel of Stiles' beloved jeep and looked back at him with a concerned smile.

"It's ready," she said quietly and Stiles looked from her face to the airbags that were seconds away from being turned into bombs. "I mean, I'm not an explosions expert. But the dash should shape the charge enough to shatter the windscreen. If we're less than four feet deep, the blast could set us free."

"And if we're more than four feet?" Stiles asked cautiously and Lydia paused.

"Then the concussion will turn our brains into jelly," she said slowly.

He could die tonight, Stiles realised. This could be his last moment on earth. Stiles looked back at Lydia's face to see her equally as stricken, as if she had just allowed herself to come to the same realisation.

After a moment, Lydia ducked down to pick up Stiles' notepad from the floor. She grabbed two pens and handed one to Stiles as she began to tare pieces of paper from the notepad. Stiles looked down at the pen in his hand dumbly and frowned at Lydia.

"What are you doing?" He asked carefully. Lydia looked like a women on a mission and Stiles didn't really want to interrupt her. Lydia paused for a moment and looked up at Stiles.

"I'm writing a note to Scott," she whispered, almost like she was scared to say it out loud.

"Scott?" Stiles asked and his frown deepened. "Why?"

"Because I have to say goodbye." Lydia ripped a second piece of paper from the notepad and handed it to Stiles. He looked at the paper in confusion but didn't take it. "Isn't there someone you want to say goodbye to?" Lydia asked, though Stiles was sure that she already knew the answer to that question. He looked at the offered piece of paper for a moment longer before tentatively taking it from his friend. Lydia immediately ducked her head and began scribbling on the paper, but Stiles wasn't sure what to write. He pulled the cap off his pen and slowly lowered it to the paper, using the door as a hard surface to write on. Stiles took a deep breath and just wrote the first thing that came to mind. Once he was done, he stared at the paper for a moment longer before folding it and tucking it away into the pocket of his jeans.

Lydia was already done by the time that Stiles looked back up at her. She smiled, but Stiles knew that she was terrified too.

"We have to get as far away from the blast as possible," she said calmly and Stiles nodded.

"I already am," Stiles offered his hand for Lydia to take. "Care to join me?" Lydia grasped Stiles' hand and crawled over the back of the seat. She grabbed the two wires that she'd striped and prepared to detonate the airbags. They stared at each other for one last second before Lydia closed her eyes and clicked the 2 wires together. Stiles barely had enough time to think ' _goodbye, Derek_ ' before the airbags exploded.

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Derek heard a muffled bang from outside, as if someone had dropped something heavy, and then there was howling. Derek didn't pause, he ran straight outside and towards the howling pack. They were all clambering to their knees and digging into a disturbed mound of dirt. Derek didn't know what was happening without his heightened werewolf hearing, but he didn't question it.

He sunk to his knees along with them and began to search through the dirt. Scott found someone and began to pull them out of the dirt with the help of several other members of the pack. Derek paused just long enough to see Lydia get lifted from the dirt.

"Get Stiles," she whispered in a destroyed voice and Derek chest loosened slightly. Stiles was alive! But he was buried and needed saving. Derek began to search more frantically in the soil.

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Someone grabbed hold of Stiles' hand. He didn't know who it was, but he could feel himself being heaved from the dirt that was surrounding him. The moment he broke free, Stiles started gasping for air, taking in as much oxygen as he could while his body was coughing the dirt out of his mouth and throat.

It was the middle of the night, and so Stiles was able to open his eyes without them hurting as they tried to adjust to the light. He looked up and found that the hands who had found him and dragged him to the surface belonged to Derek. Stiles glanced up at him and smiled as he tried to stop coughing. Stiles' ears were ringing from the explosion and so it took him a while to register the shouting. When he did though, he turned from staring up at Derek to the rest of the pack who, all but Scott who was caring for Lydia, were standing up and facing a small group of hunters.

The hunters all had their weapons armed and were facing them at the werewolves, Stiles couldn't quite make out what they were saying from the ringing in his ears. But then Braeden was there. She held a gun up against their leader's head and they were suddenly backing down. Stiles wished he could hear what Braeden was saying to them, but the ringing his ears wouldn't stop.

Once Stiles realised none of his friends were about to get shot, he turned his gaze back to Derek. Derek, who was cupping Stiles' face, neck, shoulders… _searching for injuries_ , Stiles' brain managed to provide and it made Stiles feel warm. Derek had saved him ( _again_ ), Derek was worried that he was hurt.

Stiles smiled up at him and tried to sit up, suddenly realising that his head was resting in Derek's lap, but Derek wouldn't let him move just yet. He was talking and Stiles hated that he couldn't hear what Derek was saying.

"I'm okay," Stiles tried to say. But his throat was sore and dry. He didn't know if Derek's human hearing would be able to pick up his words. He cleared his throat and tried again. But before Derek reacted in any way, Braeden was placing her hand on his shoulder. Stiles watched Derek look up at his BAMF girlfriend and smile in a way that Stiles had never seen him smile before. It was relaxed and carefree and just so _happy_! The note that Stiles had wrote to Derek, only a few minutes ago, burned a whole in his pocket. It wasn't that Stiles didn't want Derek to be happy… but was it so wrong to wish Derek would be happy with someone _other than_ Braeden. Like, Stiles, for example. Was that really so wrong?

Stiles looked from Braeden, who had probably been a big help in saving his and Lydia's lives, and back to Derek's beaming face. And yeah, Stiles knew he was being selfish. But he thought about the note in his pocket. He thought about how he had _finally_ , let himself confess his true feelings for Derek after all these years. Finally put it all into words. Stiles realised suddenly that it was a lot easier to admit he was in love with Derek Hale when he thought he was going to die… a lot harder to do so when he had to live the rest of his life knowing that Derek would never want him in the same way.

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 **Yes, I know, sad ending. Probably not what you guys were hoping for… but I do have a sequel planned. It doesn't really fit into this episode, if it did then I would have had it written by now and I'd be posting it tonight. But it does carry on from it and hopefully it will be a satisfying ending :) I'll try to have it finished and posted by next week. But, until then, leave me a comment below?**


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